virilent
She called me “little boy“ one morning and I have never let that go.
Pettiness, vindictiveness, resentment; no resource is beneath exploitation. This one, though, went somewhat deeper than I expected. Less of a mining job than a coring. In a space like that, you could build just about anything you can imagine. In the end, there was room enough for a room.
I never needed to see her, inside. But, just before it was sealed, I did. Not necessary, and not for nothing; since the first greenshift, I had been increasingly anxious that seeing her face – or not, one or the other – might cause me to be more, or less, cripplingly afraid of her during what’s to come. So I looked. Of course, I’ll never know whether that look left me better off, or worse, than if I hadn’t.
In the very next session, I found myself dead-eyed in a thin pane of glass, around which I came to the basement level of a large, abandoned parking garage, wall-to-wall with dancing twenty-somethings and teenagers. I could hear the music, but as though I were hearing it from two or three floors up. The dancers didn’t appear have the same problem. The room was rather dark, but each person’s irises seemed to be illumined. Not glowing, but softly backlit.
For once – or, I suppose, for the first time – I understood instantly.
Now came the music, crashing through the floors above, one at a time, crushing level after level until the ceiling cracked from corner to corner. Then the walls. The ground. The dancers. They never noticed, never stopped dancing as the music poured in through every fracture, as each fragment shattered into millions more, all disintegrating to dust so fine that it couldn’t be seen, save for the odd glitter of blue here, green there, dissolving into boundless black.
All, gone.
In prior sessions, I may have been there all night and morning. This time, what I needed was there waiting for me – looking for me. Likewise, afterward, I didn’t need to wonder why it happened; a windowless room is more useful than it appears from either side of its walls.